Mother

Connected Home Sensors

It’s time to update the old adage “mother knows best.” In the age of the Internet of Things, it’s more like “mother knows all” — at least when you’re talking about the Mother wireless sensor system from Sen.se.

Most home sensor networks are focused on monitoring and controlling the home environment — tracking temperature, controlling appliances, and the like. Mother does some of that, too, but the focus is much more on people than things. Thanks to the adaptable sensors known as Motion Cookies, Mother can help you monitor, understand, and optimize your family’s daily routines.

Want to encourage your kids to brush their teeth more thoroughly? Strap a Cookie to each of their toothbrushes. Want to know who’s ruining their appetite before dinner, or raiding the fridge for midnight snacks? Drop one in the fridge door. Each Cookie uses built-in algorithms to detect patterns of motion and report them to the pear-shaped Mother base station. A smartphone app lets you tell Mother what to pay attention to, view the data, and set goals to gamify your habits. Nothing like a little friendly competition to improve your oral hygiene.

Mother will recognize the signatures of a bunch of common motions out of the box — everything from the swing in your step to the tilt of a medicine bottle — and Sen.se plans to release an API so other developers can take advantage of the Cookies’ motion algorithms. The Cookies can also sense ambient temperatures, and constantly signal their presence so Mother will always know who’s at home (and when they got in last night). Other kinds of sensors will be offered in the future, but Sen.se founder and long time Internet of Things entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian kept mum about the specifics in an email exchange with Postscapes.

The privacy-conscious will be happy to know that although the Cookie’s presence beacon is always active, Haladjian assured us that all a snoop could know is that there was a Cookie somewhere nearby. Most of the motion data processing is done through a free cloud service, and the Cookies only transmit their data when they are linked to that service through a Mother. Away from the base station, each Cookie can store about 10 days worth of data. And you have to love Sen.se’s privacy policy: “All data generated by devices you buy is yours, only yours. Period.”

Preorders for Mother will begin shipping in Spring 2014. Watch the video below to see more of the ways Mother can keep her benevolent, all-seeing eye on you.